This isn’t simply a finger-wagging moralizing, though: it’s not simply that you want bad things – on a similar level to the “carrot” of the fulfillment of our propagandized desires, there’s also the limitations forced on us by everything else. Look: not everyone who eats fast food is under the impression that it’s something good or at least neutral – someone may be utterly convinced that it’s poison and still feed it to their kids every day because they have no other option.
Read MoreIn fiction, and broadly in aesthetics, punk is largely anti-authoritarian but non-revolutionary. In the political compass sense, it tends towards the bottom or “libertarian” end (caveat: people who claim to be libertarian in the US political sense are not and never will be punk. Don’t @ me.) In narrative media, this tends towards a somewhat mythic structure (similar to the thing I called “the millennial monomyth” a while back), a paradigm that all -punk stories usually follow, similar to 19th century realism or naturalism in many ways. Consider a capable but fairly normal person who wishes to be largely left alone; consider some powerful agency or circumstance that will not do that. The story is the Rube Goldberg interaction that arises here.
Read More
